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2. This volume include four short stories: Iolanthe's Wedding;
The Woman Who Was His Friend; The New Year's Eve Confession; and
The Gooseherd.

IOLANTHE'S WEDDING

BY HERMANN SUDERMANN

AUTHOR OF "THE SONG OF SONGS"

TRANSLATED BY ADELE S. SELTZER

NEW YORK
BONI AND LIVERIGHT
1918

Copyright, 1918,
By BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc.

CONTENTS

Iolanthe's Wedding

The Woman Who Was His Friend

The New Year's Eve Confession

The Gooseherd

IOLANTHE'S WEDDING

IOLANTHE'S WEDDING

CHAPTER I

I tell you , gentlemen, it's a rotten piece of business to be standing
beside an old friend's open grave simply disgusting.

You stand with your feet planted in the upturned earth, and twirl your
moustache and look stupid, while you feel like crying the soul out of
your body.

He was dead there was no use wishing he weren't.

In him was lost the greatest genius for concocting and mixing punches,
cocktails, grogs, cobblers every sort of drink. I tell you, gentlemen,
when you went walking in the country with him and he began to draw the
air in through his nose in his peculiar fashion, you might be sure he
had just conceived a new idea for a punch. From the mere smell of a
weed he knew the sorts of wine that had to be poured over it to bring
into being a something extra fine, a something that had never before
existed.

All in all he was a good fellow, and in the many years we sat opposite
each other, evening after evening, when he came to me at Ilgenstein, or
I rode over to him at Döbeln, the time never dragged.

If only it hadn't been for his eternal marriage schemes. That was his
weak side. I mean as far as I was concerned. As for himself "Good
Lord," he'd say, "I'm just waiting for that vile water to creep up to
my heart, then I'll slide off into the next world."

And now it had come to that. He had slid off. He lay there in his black
coffin, and I felt like tapping on the lid and saying:

"Pütz, don't play this dirty trick on me. Come out. Why, what's going
to become of our piquet to day?"

Nothing to laugh at, gentlemen. Habit is the most violent of all
passions, and the number of persons that are ruined every year by
having their habits interfered with are never sung in song or epic, to
quote my old friend Uhland.

Such weather! I wouldn't send a dog out in such weather. It rained and
hailed and blew all at the same time. Some of the gentlemen wore
mackintoshes, and the water ran down the folds in rivulets. And it
ran down their cheeks and into their beards perhaps a few tears,
too because he left no enemies behind. Not he.

There was only one chief mourner what the world calls chief
mourner his son, a dragoon of the Guards in Berlin. Lothar was his
name. He had come from Berlin on the day of his father's death, and he
behaved like a good son, kissed his father's hands, cried a good deal,
thanked me gratefully, and did a dreadful lot of ordering around a
lieutenant, you know when all of a sudden well, I was there and we
had arranged everything.

As I looked out of the corner of my eyes at the handsome fellow
standing there manfully choking down his tears, I thought of what my
old friend had said to me the day before he died.

As I said, that is what occurred to me, and when the pastor beckoned to
me to come throw the three handfuls of earth in the grave, I silently
sent a vow along with them, "I will not forsake him, old fellow, Amen."

Everything comes to an end. The gravediggers had made a sort of mound
of the mud, and laid the wreaths on top, since there were no women at
the funeral... Continue reading book >>